Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
"basic cognitive processes underlying explanatory reasoning give rise to a systematic inherence bias among practicing scientistsβa tendency to explain phenomena in terms of their inherent properties rather than external factors"
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Q. Who aligns the aligners?
A. alignmentalignment.ai
Today Iβm humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the ππ²π»ππ²πΏ π³πΌπΏ ππ΅π² ππΉπΆπ΄π»πΊπ²π»π πΌπ³ ππ ππΉπΆπ΄π»πΊπ²π»π ππ²π»ππ²πΏπ.
β€οΈ
Just out in Cognitive Psychology
Lossy encoding of distributions in judgment under uncertainty
By @tadegquillien.bsky.social , me & Chris Lucas
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
We find people's 'best guesses' sneakily encode distribution information that guesser & others can reconstruct later
Sounds a little like Ely et alβs operationalisation of suspense www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
We often assume that specialized roles improve performance in multi-agent systems, but when does specialization emerge based on a given task and environment? π§΅π
βοΈ New preprint w/ Ruaridh Mon-Williams, @neilbramley.bsky.social, Chris Lucas, @natvelali.bsky.social & @cocoscilab.bsky.social
I'm very excited to share notes on Probabilistic AI that I have been writing with @arkrause.bsky.social π₯³
arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05244
These notes aim to give a graduate-level introduction to probabilistic ML + sequential decision-making.
I'm super glad to be able to share them with all of you now!
New book "Explanation in Biology" with Cambridge University Press is out & open access!
Covers (1) causal explanation & (2) non-causal/mathematical explanation in life sciences--bio, neuro, etc πΏπ§¬π§
Introduction to philosophical work on scientific explanation!
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
New paper in #ProcB with @alexmesoudi.com, @jfbonnefon.bsky.social, @rmcelreath.bsky.social and Rob Boyd.
We investigate how social learning shapes the way we explore and show that it can even preserve useless theories! π§΅π
Our paper on if you can incentivize rule induction in humans with money is finally out (answer is: it appears to be a very weak/0-ish effect in contrast to the huge effect of financial incentives on rote, repetitive tasks). credit to pamop, ben newell & dan bartels psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
New preprint with @neilbramley.bsky.social and Chris Lucas:
We argue that causal judgments are supported by richer mental representations than traditionally assumed, and that this hypothesis can help solve some puzzles about causation.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Graphic inviting individuals to become reviewers for CogSci 2025, with the text 'Become a Reviewer for CogSci 2025 and help shape the future of Cognitive Science' in bold and bright green letters. The background is teal, featuring a stack of paper and a magnifying glass with an eye symbol, representing review and analysis.
We're on the lookout for passionate minds to join us as reviewers for #CogSci2025. This is your chance to be among the first to check out groundbreaking research while playing a crucial role in shaping the future of #CogSci
Visit cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/ and fill out the form!
CogSci2025 poster has landed, in both βwow the future looks bright for CogSciβ mode, and also βour theories will make you think and possibly write poetry modeβ. @neilbramley.bsky.social @carenwalker.bsky.social @cogscisociety.bsky.social
...and propose that stochastic program induction algorithms (MCMC & adaptor grammars) help explain how cognition innovates & help anticipate core cognitive phenomena inc. order effects, anchoring, confirmation bias & probability matching.
We suggest that genuine conceptual innovation is blind & incremental, involving selection among random local mutations and recombinations of (parts of) a cognizer's current world model. We relate this idea to Universal Darwinism...
"Local search and the evolution of world models" (psyarxiv.com/e9p8k/). New paper forthcoming in TopiCS with Bonan Zhao, Tadeg Quillien & Chris Lucas
